


The Recidivist

by themegalosaurus



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angry Sam Winchester, Birthday, Coda, Episode: s13e20 Unfinished Business, F/M, Gen, Hurt Sam Winchester, Sam Winchester's Demonic Powers, Season/Series 13
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-05-01 14:56:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14523108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themegalosaurus/pseuds/themegalosaurus
Summary: Since Lilith, Sam's stopped chasing revenge. He's starting to forget about why. (Coda for 13x20, birthday fic for May 2nd 2018.)





	The Recidivist

Rowena, glassy and terrified, begging Sam for the spell that would unbind her powers.

No, further back. Jack in his bedroom, sleeping or just avoiding Sam. Dean off with Jody. And a pencil on the library table, unmoving. Inviting.

Further still. A girl in a basement, a crucifix, a whip. “I could move things with my mind,” Sam had told Magda; then, “Not anymore.”

–

The night after they pick up Gabriel, after Loki is killed, Sam dreams about Rowena, purple-eyed and crackling power. He’s holding her, her body tiny in his arms, her breasts soft against him. She uncurls her fingers, fuzzes magic over his skin. In a blink, he’s holding Ruby, Rowena’s red hair turned dark. She tastes familiar and he presses his face against her neck, setting his teeth into the flesh, carotid and jugular under his tongue. “You didn’t need the feather, Sammy,” she says, disappearing with an incongruous flutter of wings. Sam wakes up hard.

Seven years, Gabriel was tortured, and it bent him almost out of himself. Sam doesn’t, can’t let himself, think about time in the Cage: the span of it, the endlessness. And Lucifer, now, making jokes about Sam’s hair products as he stands in a shitty motel.

Revenge ends ugly. Sam’s ugly already. What’s inside of him is ugly but it’s getting so he doesn’t care. He’s beginning to forget why he keeps that part locked up. 

When Dean died and went to hell it hadn’t been good, nothing about it had been good but there had been at least a kind of sharp hungry clarity in Sam’s need for revenge. And then Dean had come back but by then, of course, Sam had been halfway down a slippery slope and he’d closed his eyes and slid. That didn’t work out so well. 

Since then, he’s kept a lid on things, pretty well. He’s gotten good at not revenging. He didn’t kill Cole or Lady Bevell. He still hasn’t killed Ketch, even after working out what happened to Magda. (“You can do that?” “Not anymore.”) He’s worked with Walt and Roy, and they offloaded a shotgun into his chest. 

“I’m not going to apologise for protecting you,” Dean said last night, and it made Sam dizzy with frustration and rage. He’s been here before, struggling for the high road, wrung out and desperate, bled dry. How many times can he prove himself? “Do you remember what happened last time we had front-row tickets to the Lucifer-Michael show?”  Yes. Sam remembers.  _They won._  Sam won. He pulled the devil back down to hell. And then. 

“You didn’t need the feather.” Thrumming with the dream, Sam jerks off hurriedly, biting his lip when he comes. The bite is hard enough to break the skin. The iron in his mouth feels right. 

It’s not even really a decision, in the end. It’s more like… not taking a decision. Letting go. Choosing to set aside the choice that he’s made, unrecognised, every day for the last eight years. 

(Eight years. Some places, they’d give you a chip for that.) 

Demon blood’s not hard to come by in their line of work. Sam summons her right into the basement. He doesn’t even have to kill her. She offers her throat real fast. “There’s a vacancy in hell,” she tells him. Sam doesn’t care about that. It’s Lucifer he’s thinking of, though as the power kicks in he’s not thinking so much about anything really. He fucks her, after, leaves her squirming in the trap on the floor. He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand as he heads upstairs. 

He’s dialling Rowena. “I’ve got a proposal,” he says; and surprising her, “Sure, that too.” He’d forgotten that hot charge, the kick of it. Lust. He’d almost forgotten  _that_  altogether. And whose fault. 

Sam has a fire inside him, burning along his nervous system. He’s done with keeping himself on lockdown. Happy birthday to him.

**Author's Note:**

> This is shorter than the stuff I usually post on AO3 - you can find more of my short fics [on my Tumblr](http://themegalosaurus.tumblr.com/tagged/my-fic) \- but it had been a long time, and I liked this one, so here it is.


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